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Wednesday, 13 May 2015

#MustRead: Buhari Must Not Put The Cart Before The Horse - by Abiodun Ladepo

The
current fuel crisis may be causing President-elect Muhammadu Buhari to
rue his fourth and successful quest for the presidency of Nigeria and
revisit the old maxim: Be careful what you pray for, because you just
may get it. The intractability of the problems associated with fuel
scarcity is so overwhelming I would not wish it on my enemy. Most people
would not wish it on their enemies either. But obviously, not Goodluck
Jonathan; he quickly washed his hands off the tottering ship of the
nation’s economy, conceded defeat, called it a day and earned the “hero”
appellation to boot, after doing nothing to prevent the situation for
six years!

How was he now ever going to get petrol from the
importing vessels to the filling stations without using the greedy
marketers? (Build pipelines across the nation? Use the trains instead of
tankers?) How was he going to bring down the cost of petrol without
subsidising the marketers? (Refine our crude oil here in Nigeria?) How
was he going to refine our crude oil so that the marketers he was
subsidising could be defanged? (Fix our dilapidated and comatose
refineries? Build new ones?) He was indeed in a quandary.

These
were some of the basic questions for which any person presiding over
the affairs of Nigeria had to find answers in April 2015. Who would have
wanted to have to deal with those rapacious, unpatriotic marketers
whose stock-in-trade had always been hostage-taking? They held Nigeria
by the jugular and would not let go until their viperous, predatory and
insatiable vampire-like thirst was quenched, only to be, of course,
renewed in a few months’ time when they would be thirsty again. Uneasy,
really, did lie the Jonathan head that bore the crown.

It did
not bother the oil marketers that Nigeria was going through a hellish
period of epileptic supply of electricity where whole communities, nay,
whole local government areas remained in total blackout for weeks and
months.They didn’t even care to know that if you didn’t have electricity
but you managed to have a generator, you’d need fuel to power that
generator. And that if you couldn’t buy fuel or you had to spend a chunk
of your salary to buy fuel, life for you might not really amount too
much. By the way, how could a civil servant in, say, Osun State, who had
not been paid for over six months, find money with which she could feed
her children, let alone buy fuel for her generator, and fuel for her
car? The marketers knew that once the cost of fuel went up (and up it
went by 300 per cent in some places), the cost of public transport also
went up, and concomitantly, the cost of food and related items went up.
Add this astronomical rise in the cost of everything to salary delay for
months, and you have created another veritable incubus that’ll eat deep
into the very fabric of our nation.

But they didn’t care. They
didn’t care just like the university and polytechnic lecturers who went
on strike for months didn’t care about their students; just like doctors
and nurses didn’t care about their patients when they too went on
strike. They all claimed they did it for the sake of their respective
institutions. But we all knew they did it as a way of getting their own
shares of the national cake. They saw the politicians earning ungodly
salaries and emoluments for doing nothing and on top of those, cornering
huge amounts in kickbacks for unexecuted contracts. They had to have
their own shares.

And so, periodically, those in the oil
industry too must manufacture their own blackmail and subject us to the
vicious cycle of strikes, negotiations and settlements. This Sisyphean
struggle we face with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation people
started with the criminal neglect of our oil refineries over the years,
which led to their breakdown. It then progressed to the sabotaging of
the same by deliberately throwing clogs in the wheel of every effort
geared towards reviving them. (Why would the oil cabals facilitate
anything that would interfere with the subsidy scam that allows them to
rake in tons of dollars for services poorly performed at best, and
rarely performed at all in most cases?) This blackmail has now morphed
into songs for the outright sale of the NNPC. Remove the subsidy, say
the economics gurus in their grandiloquence, and allow the “market
forces” to rule.The “market forces” to which they refer is the absence
of federal control over oil prices, allowing private investors to
operate in a “liberalised economy”. And the “liberalised economy” to
which they refer is the environment in which the elite who stole our
money from the NNPC in the first place will now buy the same NNPC,
continue to capriciously determine when they provide us with services
and how much we pay for those servicesREGARDLESS of how poor those
services are – just like we now do with the power companies! This same
school of thought, if pressed for a solution to the Nigerian military’s
problems, will surely advocate its privatisation! We have to treat our
oil industry like smart nations treat their energy industry: like it is a
national security issue because it is!

Removing subsidy right
away is a portentous peregrination on which the Buhari administration
must not embark because it has doom and gloom written all over it. If
the economists are right and Buhari must remove the subsidy, he must not
put the cart before the horse. He must not further raise the cost of
fuel on the ordinary folk before aggressively embarking on the repair of
oil refineries and the building of new ones, including encouraging
private sector investment. He must not raise the price of fuel before
ferociously attacking the entrenched, systemic and ingrained corruption
in the entire oil sector. The man on the street will never understand
why he has to pay more for fuel (on top of all the other pains he is
suffering) when he knows that some privileged people are hauling
Ghana-must-go bags of oil-related dollars for personal use.

As
things stand presently, Nigerians don’t feel the effect of oil subsidy.
They know that government is not subsidising the oil they consume but
the un-lifted and undelivered phantom oil being claimed by the marauding
marketers. You have to plug that leakage before you can accurately
determine if subsidy is worth it or not. If Buhari walks over the
landmine of subsidy removal laid for him by the outgoing government, the
All Progressives Congress can rest assured it would lose the next
presidential election to the opposition by a landslide margin. Nigerians
didn’t vote for Buhari because they thought he was the Messiah or
because the APC had a plethora of better ideas in its manifesto. They
voted massively against the serial philistinism, ineptitude and above
all, corruption that characterised the Jonathan administration. They saw
Buhari as an epitome of incorruptibility, competence and honesty.

Whether
or not subsidy is removed, the monster of corruption in the NNPC must
be excised and exorcised as a matter of urgency. The ordinary man will
be more than willing to sacrifice if he sees known embezzlers in the
NNPC regurgitating stolen funds on their way to the prison. Any attempt
to punish ordinary Nigerians before punishing oil thieves, subsidy
scammers and refinery saboteurs will be seen as a lazy and escapist
approach to solving the problems in the oil sector. It will lead to
another “Occupy Nigeria” movement. And this time, the Nigeria Labour
Congress may not be as pliant as it was with Jonathan. It is a scenario
from which the APC may not recover.

- Abiodun Ladepo is a communications specialist based in Ibadan, Oyo State